Robert Webb

I worked with Matt for two years at Imagine Careers as a full stack developer. Matt was a very friendly, intelligent and awesome person to work with. He would consistently map out product development, as well as design implementations that didn't leave any questions unanswered. Consistently, his designs would anticipate tricky problems and avoid them altogether, or deal with them in maintainable ways. His experience was a huge help as it bailed us out of many of a rough spot.

Matt didn't just answer questions and design implementations though. His coding skills carried the product's backend. He implemented, maintained and deployed Elasticsearch, RabbitMQ, Symfony, Jenkins, Redis, InfluxDB all on AWS which had easily available logs, alerted us of errors and were very simple to interact with. Additionally, he implemented hundreds of API endpoints, dozens of console commands, and some helpful bash scripts. Our service layer was also mostly done by him, which includes doing complex resume matching using ElasticSearch, maintaining a users session in Redis, a simple way to asynchronously process jobs using RabbitMQ and many others. Additionally, his PHP skills really shined through in the services and controllers that he'd write that maintained just about every interaction that the product had that was the least bit complicated. Finally, he contributed a ton to the Angular 2+ front end as well, including developing a chat for users to have with other companies. Matt's coding carried the product and made the backend very easy to work with as someone without a ton of programming experience.

As a junior developer myself, Matt was there whenever I had questions and would teach me how to solve problems in a way that would prevent them from coming back up again. Additionally, he taught me about design patterns and how to code in tricky situations without proper testing or quality assurance. He was patient with me even though I made quite a few mistakes when starting out. He was very approachable and friendly, and made me feel like a valued member of the team. Even though I lacked experience, my input was acknowledged and used.

The rest of the team also greatly benefited from Matt's presence and help. Matt would consistently help out interns and other employees with issues that they had, even if they weren't in his exact realm of expertise. This created an effect where people felt safe at work, because they knew they wouldn't be blocked for too long by their problems. Additionally, he helped break up work into problems such that everyone had something they could do to help move the product along, no matter how new they were. Everyone on the team was useful to the product in their own way, and that really helped make the office a nice place to work.